


Come Down on Your Own

by ignipes



Series: Zombie Apocalypse (Supernatural) [3]
Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-28
Updated: 2007-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-03 09:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After seven months and three thousand miles, they stop running.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Down on Your Own

The corridor is empty, long and white. He stays close to the wall, darts across the open doorways and glances over his shoulder, and his footsteps are whisper soft on the cold floor.

There are no other patients, no doctors or nurses. He hears nothing except a quiet, steady beeping. It grows louder as he moves through the hallway, and another sound joins it: low voices rising and falling, too indistinct to understand. His heart begins to thud rapidly and his hands clench into fists. He needs a weapon -- something to hold, something to swing, anything -- so he slips into the closest room and picks up an IV pole. It feels light, more like air than metal, but he adjusts his grip around the cool rod and goes into the hallway again.

Five rooms down, harsh white light shines through an open doorway, slicing across the corridor like a blade, flickering unsteadily when shadows cross its path. He quickens his pace, no longer pausing cautiously at each door, and stops with his back to the wall just outside the room.

Inside there are three voices, two that he recognizes: the petite nurse who whispered bitter apologies every time she plunged a needle into his arm and the male doctor with the mustache and sad eyes. The other voice is female, an older woman with a smoker's rasp. Even though he's barely eight feet away, even though the door is open, their words are still muffled and slurred, still impossible to make out.

He takes a deep breath, raises the IV pole, and steps through the doorway.

They are standing over the bed, needles in hand, heads bent low. Their white jackets glow with severe light and their skin is pale, greenish, blending them into the antiseptic room like chameleons, their faces smooth and strange as though he's looking through warped glass.

Only the bed is in focus: pale blue sheets over a motionless body, metal side rails and handcuffs around bleeding wrists, mop of dark hair spread over a pillow spotted with blood.

He lunges forward, a roar of fury tearing from his throat, and swings the IV pole toward the nearest of them.

The petite nurse is holding a tray of glinting scalpels and scissors, and time slows as she turns around. Suddenly he's swinging against resistance, fighting in water, and before the pole strikes she blinks slowly and says, _I'm so sorry. This is the only way we'll ever stop it._

The pole connects and her head snaps back with a spray of blood.

-

Dean wakes with a gasp.

_Sam._

His hands are empty; he's flat on his back; the ceiling is dark. He's in a bed -- panic squeezes his chest, stops his breath, but his brain catches up to his eyes and he blinks rapidly several times. The ceiling is dark because it's made of wood, Sam is asleep beside him, and the pale yellow sunlight of early morning glows through the window over the bed.

They left the hospital behind weeks ago, left it in a roar of flames and a squeal of tires, racing away as the horde swarmed in, shrieks of hunger filing his ears and pleas spilling from his lips: _Don't you die, don't you die on me, Sammy, don't you dare fucking die--_

Breathing with measured control, Dean pushes himself upright, wincing as his muscles protest and his ribs remind him not to make any sudden motions. He sits on the edge of the bed, rolls his shoulders and yawns, rubs his eyes sleepily and looks behind him.

Sam is sound asleep, sprawled on his stomach and hugging the limp pillow like he used to hug his teddy bear when he was a kid. Part of Dean wants to shake him awake, hear his grumble of protest and see his eyes open tired but alert, just to make sure.

But he lets Sam sleep and stands up -- Christ, he feels like an old man, stooped and exhausted -- pulls on his t-shirt, stumbles into the other room.

It's the smallest house on the island, this one they've chosen, just two rooms perched at the edge of a tidewater marsh, wood stove in the main room and a rocking chair on the porch, black and white picture of a bashfully looming lobsterman and his pretty, smiling wife on the wall.

They searched the entire island yesterday after Sam worked his sailor mojo and got them here safely. They went through every house and building, scoured every room, basement, and attic, guns in hand and voices hushed. The island is empty. The fifteen or so families who once called it home have been gone for months, and they have the place to themselves.

It's a twenty minute walk to town and the dock where their boat is tied up, and there are larger houses on the island, houses where they could have separate rooms and beds, but they had agreed without speaking that this one was right.

He had been too tired last night to appreciate it, but Dean feels it now, the sudden, almost overpowering sense of relief. Relief that Sam knew of this place, relief that he was stubborn enough to convince Dean it was worth the risk, relief that the island was empty and forgotten and quiet, relief that they'd made it here alive.

And relief that Sam, at least, had been with it enough last night to boil some water from the island reservoir and leave it on a pot on the wood stove. It's the sort of thing that Dean's gotten used to letting Sam remember. Clean water, fuel for fire, clothes for warmth, safe food, all that extreme survivalist crap that a life of living off of stolen credit cards in cheap motels and greasy diners hasn't exactly prepared them for. They're pretty good at it now, after months of failing power grids and large-scale quarantines, but Dean still feels like without Sam there to look out for him he would be eating botulism and drinking giardia every time he turned around.

Dean fills a mug with water and goes out onto the porch. The morning is chilly but clear, and he can feel the warmth of the sun through the trees around the house. The marsh is still in shadows, quiet lapping water and swaying grasses, and the air smells salty and clean.

Something rustles in the grass and Dean starts in alarm, then shakes his head as a pair of birds take flight, twittering and wheeling noisily over the water.

"There's nobody here," he says to himself, just to hear how it sounds out loud.

He sits down on the porch step and sips his water, half-wishing it was coffee instead. There's probably coffee somewhere on the island, stashed in somebody's abandoned kitchen cabinet, and the thought pleases him a ridiculous amount. Coffee, toothpaste, painkillers, clean socks, luxuries of civilized living. They'll make a shopping trip later, when Sam is awake and ready for some good old-fashioned looting and pillaging.

_Nobody but us. It's--_

He doesn't want to say it, doesn't even want to think it, but the word slips into his mind before he can stop it.

_Safe._

It's been more than half a year since he even dared think it was possible.

It seemed so slow when it happened, those weeks of collapse. The end of the world. Full agreement there, all across the globe. Even CNN called it that, when CNN still existed. The agonizing build of terrifying news reports from all over the world, riots that started small and grew to engulf cities, stranger's faces in the streets shifting from disbelief to shock to fear, from human and skeptical to inhuman and hateful, doctors in white with needles in hand, soldiers in gas masks and sirens falling silent, and everywhere fire and smoke, devouring neighborhoods and choking the sky, and out there, over the ocean, that's how it still is, in the places where anybody is left alive--

Dean shakes himself. One day at a time. That was what they agreed, sitting side by side in numb shock in the first of twenty-three stolen cars.

This evil was too big for them, too big to comprehend, and before they knew what they were doing, before they even made a decision, they were running. Zigzagging across the country, dodging the military and the monsters, never pausing to breathe. So much of those first few months are a blur to Dean, blending together in a waking nightmare of pain and fear, everything familiar about the world blasted to hell except for Sam by his side, so stubborn and earnest and insistent: _We'll get away, we'll find a place, just hang on, Dean, I have a plan._

Sipping his water again, Dean fights down the familiar pang of guilt. All that time Sam spent keeping them moving and keeping them alive, and Dean repays him by landing them in that hospital -- landing _Sam_ in that hospital, surrounded by people who knew just enough to recognize that he was different but not enough to know what it meant.

But that's destroyed now, too, gone up in flames.

Dean finishes his water and sets the mug down, closes his eyes against the morning sun and tries not to think about sterile white corridors and sheets stained with blood.

He's not sure he believes that this isn't the dream. Not yet. That he isn't still lost in a drug-induced stupor thanks to that apologetic bitch and her needles, too afraid to wake himself up, too tired to start running again, even though somewhere Sam is chained to a bed like a fucking lab rat while Dean lazes on an imaginary porch listening to water lap the shore and birds singing in the trees. After so long spent being unable to tell reality from nightmares--

Something creaks behind him.

Dean's eyes snap open and he jumps to his feet, turning so quickly he wrenches his back and hisses with the sharp pain. The door to the house is still open and Sam is nowhere to be seen, but the chair on the porch is rocking slightly, like somebody jostled it.

_Shit. Shit, shit, shit._

He doesn't see anything, doesn't hear anything, but his heart is racing. _Goddamned it_. He let his guard down, let himself be fooled by a pretty morning and a quiet sunrise, let himself think they'd searched the island thoroughly even though they were both half-dead with exhaustion, and he doesn't have any weapon in hand, not even a knife.

Dean waits, holding his breath. Nothing. It could be inside, inside where Sam is sleeping unprotected. He charges up the steps and into the house, grabbing a rifle from the table as he races by.

But there's nothing here. The main room is empty, and in the bedroom Sam is still drooling on his pillow in oblivious slumber. The windows are closed, the curtains unmoving.

Doubt begins to creep alongside Dean's sudden flash of fear. It could have been the breeze, he thinks, heading back outside with the gun in hand. The rocking chair isn't moving now, and he still hears nothing. It would be making _some_ noise, that he knows, if it's one of them. They're noisy fuckers and stealthy isn't exactly in their programming. And if it's a person -- no way a person could move that fast, get by him without him seeing.

He steps off the porch and begins a slow circuit around the house. There are no footsteps in the soft, muddy earth surrounding the cabin. He rounds each corner with his gun raised, but there is nothing, no sign that anybody else has been here.

When he returns to the front he hesitantly lowers his gun, forces himself to calm down. Just the breeze. Fresh ocean air and all that. Seven months of running, and a little bit of paranoia on their first day off is par for the course. He doesn't even know how to relax anymore, even in a place as quiet as--

The chair moves again.

This time, he's staring right at it. Nothing around, not even a fly, and it rocks gently on its rough-hewn legs, creaking against the porch floorboards.

Dean swings the gun up, his finger on the trigger.

The chair continues to rock slowly while he watches and -- _what the hell?_ \-- he realizes with a start that he smells something. Something odd, unexpected, mingled with the scent of the salt marsh and damp earth.

Cigar smoke. He recognizes it immediately. Cigar smoke and something cooking, the sensation strong and sudden, making his stomach rumble with hunger, and he recognizes that too: fish and garlic. Of course. Fish and garlic and cigar smoke.

"What the--"

All at once, the scents fade and the chair falls still.

Dean lowers the gun.

"You have _got_ to be fucking kidding me," he says.

Shaking his head, he goes back into the house, glaring at the chair as he crosses the porch. He sets the gun on the table, walks into the bedroom, and sits on the edge of the bed to stare at Sam. It's better than an alarm clock when it comes to his brother, has been since Sam was a teenager, the power of the freaky morning stare.

Sam stirs before long, rolling onto his back and stretching languidly, and his eyes flutter open.

"What is it?" he asks, yawning hugely. "Something wrong?"

"This place is haunted."

It takes a few seconds for it to sink in. Sam narrows his eyes, then widens them in understanding. He pushes himself up on his elbows. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Haunted?"

"Yep."

"Like, a ghost?"

"That's usually what 'haunted' means."

"An ordinary ghost?"

"Sits in his rocking chair smoking a cigar. Couldn't be more ordinary if he tried."

"Dangerous?"

"Dude, I just met him," Dean says, "but it doesn't seem like it. He seems more like an imprint than an actual personality."

"An ordinary ghost," Sam repeats, but this time it isn't a question. He sounds a little awed, like he hasn't met a thousand perfectly ordinary ghosts in his life. He shakes his head, and after a few seconds he begins to smile. "I swear, our luck," he says, and his smile turns into a laugh as he flops back on the pillow. He looks, Dean realizes, honestly cheerful and well-rested for the first time in months, not at all bothered by the news that they have a ghostly roommate. "Only us, Dean. We're the only idiots in the world who would escape from a zombie apocalypse and end up hiding in a _haunted house_."

Sam's amusement is infectious, and Dean finds himself grinning as well. He smacks Sam's leg through the covers and stands up. "Get up, sleeping beauty," he says. "There's got to be some place on this island where we can scare up some coffee."

"God, coffee. I don't even remember what coffee tastes like." Sam pulls the blankets up to his chin and closes his eyes. "I'll be there in a minute."

Dean lets him drift back to sleep and returns to the main room. Maybe their ghost is dangerous and maybe he isn't, maybe there's coffee on the island and maybe there isn't. Lots of unknowns, lots of questions spinning through his mind. Maybe this island will be safe for them and maybe it won't. Maybe somebody else will find their sanctuary and maybe they won't.

It doesn't much matter, he decides. One day at a time.

Yesterday the world was huge and terrifying, looming at their backs as they sailed away, reaching across the water with grasping black fingers, fires on the horizon and bodies piled high, screaming crowds of mindless monsters and danger from everybody they met, empty cities and dead eyes. Yesterday they had barely dared speak to each other as the mainland fell away, and they both pretended not to notice when the other looked back, waiting for the chase that never came.

That was yesterday.

Today, Dean thinks, today they're going to look for coffee and teach themselves to fish.

"Our luck," he murmurs, and he hauls their bags onto the table to start organizing their food and supplies.


End file.
